J THE \ A : -Þ---- ED :: ::::: /i\\\\ , m ; 0 0 .... .'" · 0 . )'\ . r" ., ". THE TALK OF THE TOWN Notes al1d Comment ABOUT half our ideas, we've dis- .Ll.. covered, lead nowhere. Some- thing we've read, something we've heard or seen starts us off briskly on a pearl of thought. The first few sen- tences almost write themselves; the pas- sage from head to keyboard is wide open, the words flow free. Then, however, the old paralysis sets in and we are a dead duck. The point we meant to make, so clear when we put the paper in our type- writer, is gone, spurlos versenkt. Some- times it is worse than usual; last week it was terrible. "We have just been read- ing 'The Bachelor Life,' by George ] ean Nathan, a notorious critic and buck," we began confidently one morn- ing. "Mr. N. dislikes a lot of things, in- cluding weekend houseparties, canapés, an d too much paint on milady's puss; he likes alcohol, pressed duck, and beautiful women in red-and-blue dresses. It is not a spiritual book." There we stopped. There had been something more we wished to say about Mr. Nathan, some importan t generalization, but now our total reaction to more than two hun- dred pages of stylish prose was merely that their author struck us as the friv- olous type. It was undoubtedly true, but it wasn't enough. We put that piece of paper away in our desk and tried again, this time in a nostalgic vein: "The old Aquarium had an eviJ smell and the fish an underprivileged air, but we are go- ing to miss it when it moves uptown." Again the stasis, and again the bleak so-what. There were a good many more. Once we got as far as "Wendell Willkie seems to be practically every- where these days, and so does Miss Clare Boothe;" once we wrote no more than "General Walter Krivitsky." In the end nothing came of any of them. We don't know why we bring up this grim record of unfinished busi- ness, unless it is out of an old New England instinct for salvage. Like all thrifty writers, we hate to throw any- thing away. W ESTBROOK PEGLER'S column of February 10th gave us quite a start. It was about a "cunning and in- defatigable conspirator against the rights and independence of the individual American citizen," a shrewd manipula- tor of publicity whose ultimate goal is "some scheme containing the most bind- ing elements of Communism and Hit- lerism." "Her innocent, wholehearted, humane enthusiasm," added Mr. Peg- ler, getting hot, "the whooping awk- wardness and the baby-kissing in its many variations) are only a disguise." For a moment it was hard for us to realize that this _pretty tribtite referred to the wife of the President of the United States, and not one of the Medici girls. We have followed Mr. Pegler attentively for several years, detecting in him an original voice in journalism, half Jeremiah, half Donald Duck. In 1938 he admired an animated cartoon called "Snow White," which struck him as the most cheerful happening since the armistice, but the rest has all been fury. On the whole, it has made interest- ing reading, the author having so neat a gift for hopping up the facts of Ameri- can life that timid subscribers often got the feeling that they were being tailed &1 (..r-" n I t, 1-" , ' \ 'II. , I I U by William Green and his mob. The notIon that all men are not only vile but also armed to the teeth has bright- ened our own quiet cocktail hour, and we have found a good deal of pleas- ure in the Pegler prose, which is a nice combination of gin-mill epithet and im- peccable syntax. The nosegay to Mrs. Roosevelt, however, seemed to us a mis- take. Aside from the question of taste involved in discussing the First Lady as if she were a crooked wrestling pro- moter, it may be that Mr. Pegler is un- dermining the simple faith of his pub- lic. On February 10th, the cunning and indefatigable conspirator in the White House devoted a good part of her col- umn to a placid essay on the weather. We read this and studied Mrs Roose- velt's picture, looking for the unscrupu- lous plotter against our liberties, but it wasn,'t much good. Just seemed kind of silly. In fact, it will probably be another week before we're even ready to beliève again that all union officials run flourish- ing little bagnios on the side. T HE most stimulating thought we've read up to now about the war ap- pears in a seven-column advertisement for Collier's magazine in the Times. " R ld ". b . " L d eyno s, It e gIns, put on on right in your lap." This is accompanied by a picture of Quentin Reynolds, wear- ing a trench helmet and fingering a pair of binoculars, leaning against a davit, ex- amIning line cuts of dive bombers, a submarine, and London in flames. The message of the first half of the ad is that Mr. Reynolds is the war's ace corre- spondent; that on land and sea and in the air, he has pursued "the Collier's way: get the news first, interpret it cor- rectly, present it clearly." This leads up to the message of the second half, which is in underlined letters twice as big, and runs: "And, Mr. Advertiser, it isn't such a long cry as you think from Lon- don's bomb shelters to the store In Sioux Falls where you're hoping to sell more of your refrigerators or canned goods or straw hats." Men may be dying for lib- erty and stuff, but it is encouraging tu know that their deaths are being cor-